Plastic wrote: > "Boring mainstream means cheap mainstream In my humble opinion not cheaper for the special QL-style target we were talking.
> means long term availability of standard designs at commodity prices. The opposite. Average lifespan for today's mainstream ARM MCUs is shorter than for FPGA. (Exceptions exist.) > One of the > problems hardware developers have faced in the past is they'd > pick a suitable programmable logic chip, then it would be > superseded, and they'd have to modify their designs. No point. You have to modify your design _much_ more if you need a newer generation MCU, and not just a newer logic chip. Once you have your logic including CPU in a standard HDL like Verilog, you gain the easiest upgrade path possible - far better that depending on a MCU vendor. This also goes for the peripherals. > The idea of a QL in a CPLD is nice. The Q60 split it across four - a > no-brainer at the time - but I am sure there's lots you could do > differently with newer devices on the market. I could have fitted the logic into a single chip back then. The reasons were PCB layout, noise considerations, and the fact that four chips give you more pins per area (as long as you have no BGA package). > I favor the ARM family for a couple of reasons: it's a standard > instruction set that is simple, fast, well documented You are free to favor ARM over 68K of course. That's just a matter of taste - but off our topic :-) > and incredibly cheap. My 2W power statements are for high end devices > with dual cores. Many bottom end system-on-chip ARM devices have > standard 500MHz, IDE, SATA, USB, video, I2C, etc and could easily > emulate a SGC QL. Inside a QL case, nobody would even know they were > not a QL unless told, shown, or very VERY observant ;) The owner will know... not to have to deal with Linux if you run UQLX is unrealistic. > You say it would be a "massive" amount of Linux work, but the work has > already been done. ??? You were talking to strip down an ARM Linux distro to a minimal system optimized for quick boot into UQLX. _That_ is a massive amount of future work. And only a Linux expert could do it. I'm sure ARM + Linux + UQLX does nowhere put QDOS/SMSQ in an "open market". Emulated QDOS/SMSQ is nonsense for an embedded system, unless someone already had QL affinity and experience before. (Even I would hardly choose QDOS/SMSQ for a commercial embedded system. And certainly not if it doesn't run native.) All the best Peter _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
